Deskilling is a fucking disease. In cultural production today (Art, Design, Music etc..) the receiving public is fully willing to accept the deskilled object without question. People today make no attempt to see artistic production as a discipline (in the fullest form of it's meaning), rather artistic production becomes a game where by any criteria (or principle) applied to a work to critically assess it (determine to what degree it is "good") is dismissed as not essential to the work.
As a result people are making straight up garbage and try to pretend it's conceptual, because they have no skill and no discipline. They hide behind the notion that skill, technique, discipline and craft are passe and somehow unconceptual. Most art is produced in a critical vacuum, an environment free of criticism - your fellow artists don't know shit and wouldn't want to offend you anyway. Not only that, 99% of criticism in magazines/internet/literature is purely masturbatory, artists are marketed as saints. Real criticism is key to art, without calling a work into crisis art can't move forward. The response to criticism should be defensive, but not in words - defensive in action. Defensive by making another, greater work. This is why art is stagnant.
>muh lack of craftsmanship fuck off, retard. i bet you think modernists were unskilled and fap to shitty neoclassic garbage too.
Austin Brooks
While I hate a lot of contemporary art, a lot of old art is just as shitty. Just because you do not understand the skill does mean there is an absence of skill. In your first paragraph you show how you have everything backwards. The key "problem" with contemporary art is not that criticism is dismissed, but that criticism is effectively the only substance of art. Right now, the most important work you do as an artist is the writing of your Artist's Statement, and the next most important thing is to cultivate a rigorous CV. This is why everything is conceptual. Critical theory has so devoured the arts that art has become almost solely an expression of criticism. There is good work produced this way, because there is still a skill to it. The big difference is that whereas older works that were shallow were at least pretty, now shallow work has no redeeming quality at all.
Ian Peterson
>that lack of reading comprehension what are you doing on Veeky Forums? and no, most modernists were extremely skilled conceptual artists, on the other hand...
Josiah Morris
>This is why everything is conceptual Wrong. Conceptualism was the ultimate expression of the modernist project: a break with bourgeois tradition, notions of skill, craft, beauty and art itself. Art was always subject to criticism; the difference is a movement from the retinal (as Duchamp would put it) to the purely mental, post-object art world of the 70s and forward. We need both.
Zachary James
Most modernists, if not all, were conceptual. The "old masters" were also conceptual. A history painting is a conceptual painting. That is why it existed at the top of the academic hierarchy of painting. Not only were they exceedingly difficult, they also held conceptual value. The problem you seem to have actually began with the Modernists, who rebelled against the academic system to say that it was limiting, and so they proposed whole new systems of art, which we now know as Impressionism, Pointillism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism and so forth. The transition into Post-modernism was simply the abandonment of any greater principle or stylistic determinant, so that each artist was basically an academy unto themselves with no belief in any overarching structure. Basically, the transition from Art as a craft into Art as philosophy. Not a deskilling, but a lateral movement. Also, your perspective is very narrow. There are still plenty of artists and illustrators and graphic designers who would seem to fit your desires for art. If that's what you think is good, than buy it and share it and make it bigger in the world, instead of letting the things you hate loom large in your mind. The best way to fight bad art is to look at something else.
David Brown
It looks like you didn't read what I wrote, then wrote a worse version of it, and completely missed the point.
Joseph Johnson
You seem to be deliberately misusing the word "conceptual". Art has always had an intellectual appeal as well as an aesthetic one; the accusations Greenberg, Duchamp and many others put forward regarding the "merely decorative" nature of post-impressionist art were mostly fallacious.
>Basically, the transition from Art as a craft into Art as philosophy. Your reading is too superficial: there's always been a philosophy behind art. What Duchamp intended to do was completely deny the retinal dimension of art; he came to abhorre and condemn the visual dimension of artworks (whether that's sincere or an extension of his provocative nature we will never know).
Don't get me wrong, I love the modernists: they were pioneers, both aesthetically and philosophically. What happened here is their vision got corrupted and coalesced into a toxic relationship with the art market, where the fine arts have become an arena for personalities, entrepeneurs and bland political statements instead of controversial, boundary-pushing world.
>There are still plenty of artists and illustrators and graphic designers who would seem to fit your desires for art Those people are mostly working outside the fine arts world. Deskilling is a well-documented phenomenon and it took place most explicitly in Western Europe and North America: traditional art was vehemently pushed outside traditional institutions in lieu of intellectual pursuits like linguistics, critical theory, process-based craftmanship and others.
No. Sorry, but you dont seem to have a grasp of art history.
Tyler Clark
Ok, enough negativity. A skilled creative person is a beautiful thing, worthy of admiration.
PUBLIC QUESTION:
For the writers among us, what are some resources that you think we can consume and use to improve our own skills?
I submit Strunk and White. Maybe Aristotle's poetics? The Bible?
Jason Gutierrez
I'm the same person in both, and going on and on about Duchamp, and posting huffington post doesn't help your case. Kandinsky was, without a doubt, conceptual. Mondrian was conceptual. The futurists were conceptual. As in, they developed a rigorous conceptual framework which they then sought to demonstrate and activate through an application of visual technique. All of the art movements of the modernists began as pure concept. To really drive it home, Duchamp and Dada are, by all art historical metrics, modernist. The very idea of avant-garde is both conceptual and the very height of modernist thinking. Post-modernism is not a corruption of modernism, but the extension of it. There has only been a deskilling of art from a classical, pre-modern, perspective. The modernists stopped emphasizing photo-realism, which many at the time thought was a de-skilling. The modernists held that art was something more than had been understood before, and so this was not de-skilling but actually an improvement in skill. The post-modernists have carried on in exactly the same way. It's not that there has been a deskilling, but that the very concept of art has shifted. If you don't like it, than start putting forward your vision, and champion those artists you think have the greatest skill today, according to your metrics. It's useless to point out what's wrong with a philosophy if you don't have a positive assertion of an alternative.
